Splat | WiseTome.com

I had visited to the Denver Public Library last weekend as I wanted to do some research on Ravi Varma for a write up at KalaaLog. That was when I happened to take interest in the way the books are numbered and sorted. The librarian there was helpful and gave me few pointers that got me searching on Dewey Decimal System and ISBN.

As there are a lot of books on various subjects, there needs to be a systematic approach to sorting these books so that they can be easily accessed. There are quite a few systems for doing this established by different organizations or institutions.

Also, all the books published need to be referred - from a commercial perspective. Each book that is published gets assigned a number that uniquely identifies it.

Dewey Decimal System

The Dewey Decimal Classification System was developed by Melvil Dewey. As of now, the Online Computer Library of Dublin, owns the trademark and associated copyrights for the system. Majority of the library, public and those of schools and universities follow this system to classify the books. This system broadly classifies the huge knowledge of books into ten categories, or classes. It ranges from 000 for ‘Computer science, information and general works’ to 900 for ‘History and geography’. Each of these classes are further divided into 10 divisions and they are further divided into 10 sections.

The DDC makes makes it easy for classification due to its simple decimal structure, but it is also hard to expand and add categories to it as compared to other classification systems. There are other classification systems like ‘Universal Classification System’, ‘Colon Classification’, and ‘Library of Congress Classification’ to name a few.

International Standard Book Number (ISBN)

ISBN or International Standard Book number is an identifier for all books that are published. These come along with the bar-codes.

Unlike DDC or any other type of classification, they are not meant for sorting of the books for purpose of access in library. But instead, they are meant to distinguish, which country the books was published in, by which publisher it was published and an identifier for the book by that publisher. Each edition or variation of a book gets its own ISBN unless it is a reprint.

The ISBN are either 10 digit or 13 digit. As of January 1st, 2007, all ISBN are 13 digit. The first three digits of a 13 digit ISBN is a GS1 prefix - 978 or 979. The remaining ten digits can be broken down into 4 four parts of unequal number of digits.

1. A group identifier, that denotes a country or group of country that share a language
2. The publisher code
3. The item number
4. A checksum digit

Note that the ISBN is used only for books and not for periodicals, newspaper and other media. They have a separate standard for numbering.

Photo credits

• ‘Library‘ by ladyphoenixx_1999
• ‘ISBN‘ by Rev Dan Catt